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This is an archive article published on March 26, 2022
Meta, MeitY officials to depose before panel
The standing committee is likely to seek ministry officials’ views on the ways in which the internet and especially social media intermediaries can be kept safe and trusted for children and women
Congress parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor,
Senior executives from Meta are scheduled to depose before the Standing Committee on Information Technology on Monday with respect to allegations of tampering of advertisement rates for different political parties, sources in know of the matter said.
Apart from senior executives from Facebook and WhatsApp, both owned by Meta, senior officials from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) are also scheduled to appear before the Standing Committee led by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, one of the sources said.
The panel is likely to seek MeitY officials’ views on the ways in which the internet, especially social media intermediaries, can be kept safe and trusted for children and women. It is also likely to question Meta officials on the alleged discrepancies on advertisement rates for political parties.
The Standing Committee of Parliament on IT, led by Tharoor, includes 31 members, of which 21 are from the Lok Sabha, while the rest are from the Rajya Sabha.
Last week, Congress president Sonia Gandhi asked the Centre to “put an end to the systematic interference of Facebook and other social media giants in the electoral politics of the world’s largest democracy”. “It has come to public notice repeatedly that global social media companies are not providing a level playing field to all political parties,” she had said.
Referring to a report published in Al Jazeera and The Reporters’ Collective, which claimed Facebook had offered BJP cheaper deals “by bending their own hate speech rules” for election advertisements as compared to other political parties and suppressed “the voice of all those who were speaking up against the government”, Gandhi had said that such actions were beyond “partisan politics” and that the democracy had to be protected irrespective of who was in power.
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